What’s The Point Of Marriage Anyway?
Everyday people get married. They enter into forever relationships with the best of intentions and bad days and hardship are nowhere in sight. We get married because we fall in love. We fall in love with a person’s heart, how they see and treat the world and how they see and treat us. We fall in love with the characteristics about their personality that we wish we had in ourselves and that bring us the most joy. It could be their humor or go with the flow attitude towards life that grabs our attention. From the time that we are little girls and boys everything that we see and hear (for the most part) about marriage is that it is this magical relationship where love lives and thrives. We’ll all get married and float off on a cloud together to this utopian land where arguments and the trials of life only exist for the pure satisfaction of being scoffed at. Marriage is seemingly romanticized so much so that it leaves those of us in reality wondering what the hell happened.
Marriage is hard. Many of those things that once drew us to our spouses are now the very things that irritate us. Over time, the love that our spouses have for us that that once felt like it could fill a football stadium can sometimes feel like it could fit in the box the wedding rings came in. That doesn’t mean that your love for each other doesn’t exist it just simply means that the idea of being forever “in love” has met its limit. However, just because the butterflies may be gone doesn’t mean that the love your heart holds for them isn’t real and plenty.
I don’t know about you, but as a child, teenager and young adult I was never taught what the true purpose of marriage is. I thought what most of you thought. We fall in love get married and live happily ever after. Marriage is so much bigger than that. Marriage isn’t really about “us” at all.
The purpose of marriage is to show off who God is. It’s to display Christ’s love for the church (His people.) In the same way that Jesus loved His people, bared with them, cherished them, protected them and provided for them so shall a husband in marriage. In the same way that the church submits to Jesus with gentleness, patience, love and support so shall a wife in marriage. You see, because of the model set up by God himself we, his children get to live out and display the love and promise between Jesus and the church. We get to show Him off in how we support, submit, cherish, protect and provide for our spouses and family. We get to meet one another with love, gentleness and patience because that is who God is and what He has met us with. Marriage has very little to do with us and everything to do with God, His promise, His love, His sacrifice and His commitment that is unfaltering, unchanging and forever pursuing.
When God is truly at the center of a marriage and our aim is not to please each other but to glorify Him, that’s where the magic happens. The wedding ring box couldn’t possibly contain all of the love that our hearts can hold for our spouses. The irony is that all of the things that you “need” from your spouse are satisfied in the way that you bring glory to your heavenly father’s name through your marriage. OMG is He clever or what!
